Anything within the upper region of the cone lies within the future cone of the central X. The event at the central X can affect any event in its future cone. In the diagram above, the 'a' could be affected by the event at the central X. Anything within the lower region of the cone lies within the past cone of the central X. Any events that have occured in the past cone of the central X can reach the space and time of the central X. The 'c' in the above diagram can affect the event at the central X.

The best real world example of an event cone is astronomy. Say the central X in the above diagram represents the moment that humanity turns on a beacon from Earth for all extra-terrestrialcivilizations to detect. The past cone of the event represents every event that has ever been detectable from Earth. If anybody was trying to contact us, the message would have had to originated within this past cone for it to have arrived by the time of this event. The future cone of this event represents everybody that can receive our message. The message can only reach events that lie within this cone. Assuming 'b' and 'a' in the diagram are alien civilizations. The civilization at 'b' lies in the "elsewhere" of the event at the central X. This means that 'b' cannot affect X and X cannot affect 'b'. The civilization at 'a', on the other hand, lies within the future cone of the event at the central X. They will receive our message in the future; however, the message they send will not be able to reach the event at X because it lies in their past cone (unless they are considerably more advanced that us and are capable of time travel.)

The main confusing thing about event cones is that they are two-dimensional (like the diagram above) or somtimes three-dimensional representations of a four-dimensional graph. Also, one of the dimensions in the diagram is time, which behaves very differently from the other three. For example, in the diagram above, 'a', 'b', and 'c' represent events. However, events are usually just physical objects at one instant in time. If you took 'a', 'b', and 'c' to represent other planets, they would make vertical columns in the above diagram (since they remain constant over time.) To put it another way, if 'b' really did represent an alien civilization at one point in time, they would get our message eventually, as they would eventually move into the future cone of the event (assuming they lasted until then.) This also means that all bodies in the diagram are moving upwards (though not neccesarily at a constant rate, once you account for the theory of relativity. But that's a whole different headache.)